The Pomp Podcast - Marty Bent, Host of Tales from the Crypt: The Mirage of Central Banking

Episode Date: March 2, 2020

Marty Bent is the man and legend behind Marty's Bent, a daily newsletter about Bitcoin, along with the host of Tales from the Crypt, one of the most popular Bitcoin podcasts. In this conversation, Marty and Anthony discuss the importance of freedom of speech, the mirage of central banking, why Bitcoin can change an individual's mindset, how relationship between technology and privacy is evolving, why it is difficult to live in a time where information can't be treated, what is going on with Coronavirus, and how the current political structure is not well suited for the modern world we live in.  BLOCKFI-----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. UNSTOPPABLE DOMAINS-----Make your crypto currency payments simple and build censorship resistant websites. Visit unstoppabledomains.com and purchase your blockchain domains today!

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Marty Bent is the man and legend behind Marty's Bent, a daily newsletter about Bitcoin. He's also the host of Tales From The Crypt, one of the most popular Bitcoin podcasts. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of freedom of speech, the mirage of central banking, why Bitcoin can change an individual's mindset, how relationship between technology and privacy is evolving, why it is difficult to live in a time where information can't be trusted, what is going on with coronavirus, and how the current political structure is not well suited

for the modern world we live in. As always, Marty was awesome. I really enjoyed this conversation. I think you guys will as well. But before we get into the episode, let's talk about our two sponsors. The first is BlockFi. That's right, BlockFi, absolutely killing the game. As Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies continue to evolve, we're going to need a lot of infrastructure. These wealth management services help people do more with their Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies. That's exactly what BlockFi is doing. Many of you already know I'm a huge fan of the company, and I even invested alongside with being a user. Today, BlockFi offers three products. The first is giving U.S. dollar loans against your crypto as collateral. The second is an interest-bearing

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dope. Go ahead and check out BlockFi. Longtime supporters of this podcast, and I'm a huge fan. Head on over to BlockFi.com slash Pomp and check them out. Again, BlockFi.com slash Pomp, BlockFi.com slash Pomp. One more time, BlockFi.com slash Pomp. Let them know I sent you. Now, next is Unstoppable Domains. Many of you probably heard about YouTube taking down crypto-related content or MetaMask getting removed from the Google Play Store.

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enter into the decentralized world. Promise you, super dope. You don't have to be a nerd. Go check out Unstoppable Domains' new browser. All right, let's get into this episode with Marty. He kills it like he always does. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only already that's what we're gonna make the title uncle marty's here uncle marnie

i don't know why i named myself that where did that name come from i don't know it's just a joke to lighten the mood in the newsletter all right you've been here before for those who didn't listen to the first one because they're dumb uh start from real quick kind of two minute recap what you did pre bitcoin pre uh becoming the bitcoiners everywhere i don't know voice bitcoiners everywhere is a little sup freaks sup freaks um yeah so i uh i found bitcoin in college i was studying economics at depaul university in chicago and while i was in college uh studying economics i worked for a managed futures fund and we were a fund of fun so we indexed cta traders predominantly into a suite of funds.

And my job there was an analyst in some of the markets that the CTAs that were indexing traded were currency markets. And that meant I had to follow Fed tea leaves and central bank in the world. And so early on in college, I sort of found Bitcoin and was studying it. At the same time, working at this fund, having to write commentaries on why our fund was performing against market movements. And so I had to know why currencies were moving the way they were, which meant reading a lot of Fed policy. And over the course of three years working at this fund, I sort of realized that the Fed had no idea what it was doing. I was getting more down the

Bitcoin rabbit hole and sort of found Bitcoin in that way. I decided to leave the fund about a year and a half after college um to go learn about ux ui design i was very infatuated with tech and the whole space so i went to go learn how apps were made so i decided to learn uh via design first um so i took a digital design boot camp designation i think they were recently bought by lambda school um in chicago and that was the summer 2014 and i moved up here to new york in uh like late summer 2014 and i got a job at a software company to learn about the back end of app development and stuff like that so i learned the whole code stack behind the design and then after about two years there i uh decided to quit because i thought i was going to be able

to get a job as a product manager but apparently uh if you're haven't built anything getting a job as a product manager is pretty hard so i had a little stint of unemployment there but the whole time. I was still learning about Bitcoin, studying Bitcoin. And then about a year in unemployment, year and a half in unemployment, I decided to start the newsletter, The Bent. It was June 2017. Markets were going crazy as you, quote unquote, crypto markets were going crazy as we're running into the run up of the bull market then. So I had a bunch of friends, family reaching out, emailing, texting me. hey you're a psycho like what do you know about this yeah you're the bitcoin guy like what's

going on like should we buy all this should we buy ripple should we buy iota i was like oh god no um my one claim to fame from 2017 i've never taken my victory lap but i'm gonna take it right now is i'm the one you ever seen the cnbc video of uh brian kelly on tv with two you know two dollar 50 cent xrp being like here's the order book here's how easy it is going to paul on the x here's how you buy it so uh i was sitting at my buddy's apartment in raleigh north carolina and uh we were drinking before we were about to go out and i think he had it on like tivo or like you know cnbc or whatever and uh it played and i lost it i was like wait what just happened and i was like rewind play that back no way i just saw what i think i just saw played it

The second time we're like crying and laughter. Rewind a third time and I videoed it on my phone and I just couldn't help myself. I was like, this is absurd. I tweeted it and I woke up the next day and I was like, man, I really like Brian. Take that victory lap. No, but like every once in a while now people will retweet it and they're just like, dude, $2.50 was a while ago. Yeah.

What's it at now? Like 30 cents. If that, I don't even know. We're not going to make this a XRP hate session. we're we're all friends on the internet today kind of um all right so we're the first 33 000 blocks what what what happened with uh what did you do at barcelona what was that experience like um that was a crazy experience it was a relatively short-lived experience but a crazy uh very grateful that i had the opportunity to work there especially at the time that i did

Yeah, so I started the newsletter in June of 2017 and then noticed a person who's – somebody who's a person non grata at Parcel now, my buddy Lewis, was tweeting at Stoolies that they should be buying Ethereum and I DMed him like – and this was when Ethereum was like approaching $1,200 and I was like kindly like, you should meet up. You shouldn't be pumping this stuff to the Stoolies, especially at this point in the bull market. So we met up for some drinks. just to talk about the space and he's infinitely fascinated by it and he convinced me to start the podcast and so that summer we started uh brainstorming about the podcast and uh started recording at barstool's offices and this was before i started working there i'm still unemployed looking for a job and i was lucky to be able to do the content stuff while i was unemployed and sort of just i was always hanging around the barstool offices at that point and lewis needed

an account manager on his podcast ad sales team so i took that job and um basically yeah i was able to get a front row seat to the rocket ship growing when they were hitting a takeoff speed and at the same time uh bitcoin and crypto markets were going crazy so i was the the bitcoiner in the room telling everybody to stop don't buy one chain don't buy iota um i was on the rundown a couple times it was a crazy uh fall winter that i spent there was only at barstool for like eight months but it was incredible experience and i really admire what they do and what dave portnoy in particular has done to slowly but surely build a brand over time and as you know we were talking about it earlier they were on the nasdaq yesterday flexing so my

My favorite part of yesterday was probably Dave in the suit and tie and Big Cat in like his bomber jacket. And I was just like dabbing on them all. But the crazy thing about Barstool, I think, is just they've done what a lot of people previously have tried to do. They never veered from we're just going to tell you what we think. Right. Like a lot of people tried that. And then when they get the backlash, they kind of cave to it. They backtrack.

They apologize, whatever. And like these guys just they were like, look, no. This is what we believe. They lean into it, which works and has worked for them for some time. And then on top of that, again, we like to talk about time preference a lot in the Bitcoin world. Dave is somebody I think exemplifies a low time preference, handing out papers starting in 2014. Slowly building the blog over time. And now he just – the company is worth half a billion dollars just from showing up every day.

I went back a couple of days ago and I looked for – I remember he tweeted at one point like a picture of the first newspaper. And I had forgotten that the top half is Barstool Spores and it says, for the common man, by the common man. So the motto stayed the same for 15 years. But the bottom half of the front page is a Hooters ad. I was like, man, this guy was really gunning for the ads on day one. And I think they got Hooters back as a sponsor this year too. we're 2019 so that and then once I went down the like

Dave rabbit hole like historical tweets I was like what other ridiculous things and I remembered he made the Bitcoin video. Yeah, so I tell them 17 There's a video of him and he's like, I don't know what this shit is Bitcoin Bitcoin, whatever like I'm just all in though Some guy told me this how I get rich funny story I literally set him up with a wallet right before he recorded that so I walked out of the room we shut the door and hit record on that video and i like went downstairs and i was like you should not be yeah he was like holding his treasure up in the camera i was like oh my god so the all the first time i discovered that some of the guys at bar store into bitcoin was uh nate i think like

nate either like tweeted about it or or maybe we were like dm or i forget but at some point like he revealed himself as being interested and all of a sudden i was like oh shit like these dudes have a lot of influence and if they position it as like gambling this is going to get bad real fast because like they got an army of people who are going to do what they say to do and it was just kind of like oh shit i mean that's why i was happy i mean not saying that any influence on any of these any of the barstool uh employees but i was happy to potentially be a voice of reason put some brakes on there like all right guys uh stuff's blown up and crashed many times in the past yeah it's uh slow and steady is the game here probably most likely in my opinion bitcoin

is the only one worth buying definitely is the only one worth buying in my opinion um but yeah no i mean they lean into everything like we were talking about uh zillion beers they they know when touch when something's hot and when they lean in and that's something that dave's really uh honed in on uh is leaning in on stuff yeah my favorite thing um that i've learned from barstool you don't even remember saying this to me but it's actually something you told me when you came to record the first podcast episode i think i asked you something like as you're leaving i was like what'd you learn and you're just like show up every day yeah and like it's always stuck in my head from uh that's literally what that man did it is for 14 15 years showed up every day and if

you i think erica uh nardini the ceo gave a interview and she was like yeah i got to the office and like there's like uncashed checks laying everywhere these guys had no clue what they were doing and if you go back and look at like the old rundowns it's dave standing in the quote-unquote office which really looks like his like parents attic basically rest in peace to the milton office and uh he's standing there and he's somehow videoing himself and you got big cat and kfc like sitting at their home basically and they're just talking shit to each other but it's entertaining it's funny and that's how you build the audience is like people who want to watch that stuff come back every day day after day for years and then you get what they got today yeah no i

mean i was i've been a stoolie since high school so i was how old are you uh 28 okay you're younger Yeah, so I was in college the first time. I was probably like a sophomore. I'm 31. Yeah. They had Philly. I'm from Philly. In Philly, the Philly Barstool outfit had a really good writer.

He's not there anymore. Tal Maurice, Moe. And I really liked his takes on Philly sports and the culture around Philly. That is a Philly name if I've ever heard one. I think he's working at actually – he's in New York somewhere now. But, yeah, I started reading in high school. And then when I was actually at DePaul in Chicago in college, Big Cat actually lived not too far from me. So I would see him walking Stella every once in a while.

And it's funny. I've seen the brand grow. And now I'm just happy that they are where they are now because I think they're a great example of show up, work hard. And it took a lot of hard work. Oh, for sure. Which a lot of people take for granted these days. And like we were saying, a lot of media companies try to skirt that hard work with clickbait and other stuff like that. He also – talking about like leaning in, he understands like the trends more than I think people give them credit for.

My favorite is the recent hiring of Vindog. The meme lord, Vin. 63-year-old man who – he literally just texted and goes, hey, we got a meme war brewing over here. Are you ready? And like as much as it's comical and entertaining, whatever, like that is where the world is today, right? If you overwhelm an opponent, an intellectual opponent on the internet with memes, like you win internet points and they understand that. Yeah, no, they definitely understand that and it – no, it highlights something we talk a lot about in Bitcoin too, like the sovereign individual thesis. Like it is – we talked about it in that book.

Like it's going to be independent content creators that win the minds of the masses especially as traditional media sort of gets too bloated and monolithic to move like a Barstool does. Like nobody could be as brash as Barstool is because they have too much of a quote-unquote reputation that they're worried about tarnishing. And Dave just takes it the complete opposite way and it's worked out for them. I mean, in the modern age of digital media, Barstool is obviously winning. What's your favorite segment that they do across the whole company? I'm a big fan of the wonton Don. Donnie does. I think he actually does a very good job of introducing the Barstool audience to other cultures.

And he does a – it's not your average travel show, But it definitely is a unique way to get introduced to other cultures outside of America. Yeah. I did not think you were going to pick that one. I think that my favorite thing that's happened with the segment is now Dave's become a celebrity when he does the pizza reviews. Like the fact that he walks out of a pizza store and all of a sudden there's like 20, 30 people taking pictures of him. Like what world do we live in? Yeah, I mean, I'll be sitting at my desk at home and I'll just hear my wife laughing in the background.

Like, you watching the pizza review? She's like, yeah. She loves it. No, that's another thing you lean into, right? Yeah. Just when they moved to New York, they did a few pizza reviews up in Boston, I think, like every once in a while. And then New York being the city of pizza, just lean into that. And it's become a – I've got a fucking app for it, a standalone app.

um uh they probably well actually dave probably wants this to be forgotten segment but uh i'm gonna remind everyone remember dave walks to work yeah and he would walk down the street he was live streaming and then all of a sudden people started to like recognize where he was and i remember the one day that uh some guy some stool he saw him walking down and videoed and got his bald spot and it was like mass chaos for like three days and also dave went walks to work went away on there yeah that was an incredible one i mean that's the beauty that's another thing is the beauty of of days it's like interactive with the fans yeah and that's something i try to do with our pocket like sub freaks what are you guys doing like it's walk us through kind of everything

because you started with the newsletter sorry you got the podcast uh yeah that's about it so the newsletter which is uh daily newsletter uh six days a week now um and then because you added saturday yeah standard trying to make sats the standard so we started the sat standard um guys so it's like a weekly uh branding genius that's matt o'dell um he named that um but yeah i mean i then it all started organically it's growing organically which i'm very happy of i don't think we've forced too many things up to this point and again so the newsletter started as family and friends reaching out and uh again before i even like reached out the barstool or uh work there i had the mentality of i want to bring a barstool like voice to

bitcoin because it's so hard to approach for a lot of people so i just try to make it more approachable for it with my family and friends of mine and then it's taken on a life of its own obviously a lot of people are reading it now and then the podcast was the next iteration of that and it's people are like all right i like your writing let's let's do a podcast what's the process for coming up with what to write every morning i write every morning and i i'm assuming we have the same process but i want to hear yours first i just wake up and see what i tweeted the day before and point at something like all right spend an hour writing on this so some days i have a better uh idea than others but yeah at some point you got to write and you just got to pick

something around with it i think we're very similar in the like i gotta write something so like let me quickly search for inspiration whether it's like i tweeted something somebody else tweeted or like an article and then just what do i think about this i don't know uh yeah and i see you know you hit publish and like you're done yeah i mean obviously i try to give i attempt to bring a good perspective on everything every day and be as factual and educational as possible like i was i was happy with today's bent because it was more technically focused and something you do do that more than most i think is that you whenever there's updates or i remember when like it was the inflation bug and like you're able to not only explain the

technical aspects of it but also then pull in all these different like i probably have discovered more people in the bitcoin like hardcore technical community through you than anybody else yeah no that's i don't know where you find them but you're always like oh my friend uh it's like some like random person like what the fuck it's been it's just being on twitter for so long i've been curating a bitcoin list since like 2015 i think that's like is it public or private it's public it's got like five five hundred followers now which is pretty cool for a list but um yeah I I feel like I've put my 10,000 hours in and know who to follow and where the good information comes and like again go back to the sovereign individual you have to create and filter your own news

sources and find the signal yourself it's not going to be brought to you you got to really work hard for it and over the last six seven years I've really been sort of filtering my information feeds and uh being here in new york we're blessed to be able to go to meetups like bit devs where you have some of the core developers showing up and explaining what they're working on so that certainly helps and yeah i just feel like again i put a lot of time trying to understand how this all works and uh i feel like i'm in a unique spot to sort of uh translate that for some people in a in a way which is more digestible than uh technical documents or something like that at the end of every newsletter you put your like what do you call random thought final thought

final thought um where do they come from because some of them are hysterical you the one i think i told you before you hit us one time with like uh i like sitting in the shower i was hung over there's no no worse feeling than being hung over sitting in the shower um yeah no it's literally a final thought i think i had taken a shower before i wrote the bent that morning was like so you just whatever you whatever thought you had just randomly yeah like this morning it was like a big big shave day for me i was like i wouldn't shit like trim my beard up and that was it because at some point you got to get it out and i don't i'm in a final thought it's been a lot of music lately like a song i'm listening to while i'm writing i'll just link to that youtube um say

i like this i like this song all right and then the podcast you do one to two interviews a week plus you've got the rabbit hole recap what let's talk about the interviews first and then matt odell was like the mvp surprise out of nowhere one day just like oh matt odell now it's gonna do this every single week i was like these guys are fucking incredible so where what was the point of starting the podcast initially uh people wanted more than the newsletter and they wanted to hear uh from the people i was writing about directly and again being in new york that everybody comes through new york at some point or another and there's a lot of bitcoiners here in new york so it was just easy um having been gone to bit devs and meeting these developers

and people working in the space it was pretty easy once you develop a level of trust just to be like hey you want to come on and discuss this stuff on air um and so yeah that was the impetus for that and it's been incredible i've forged some great friendships learned a lot uh doing that alone and then matt and i started rabbit hole recap in september of toward yeah september of 2018 did you know that you wanted to start like another type of show or did you guys just do one and then you're like oh let's do it again no i tapped matt on the shoulder intentionally being like we need a weekly show god i really love your shit um matt had been on the podcast earlier that here uh he's here in new york um and yeah i never i don't ever just want to put content out to put

content out like i want to make sure it's has value and so like i got to a point where i thought like i was forcing interviews and something like a weekly news show something with matt was something dependable where you keep putting content out and it's not forced it's uh it's actually got a legit um strategy and and sort of uh like that's what i'm looking for cadence and structure if you will make sense um how do you think about like freedom of speech in today's world now that we've seen the great purge of zero hedge on twitter i think freedom of speech is uh i know you have a lot so for those that don't know uh i've seen i think you go on two tirades on twitter over the last like maybe 12 months or so

that i can remember and one of them was all around the zero hedge situation so just like it happened zero hedge got banned there's a whole bunch of controversy around who led to that banning who participated why they got banned was it doxing was it not all stuff it's been a couple of weeks now like what's your thoughts now yeah i mean i don't think more fired up or less fired up i mean that's a that's a thing like time passes there's it feels like you're powerless there's nothing you do like i'm definitely it kind of feels like it's over yeah exactly i don't i'm obviously not as fired up as it was i think it was exactly three weeks ago at this point as it was this time three weeks ago but i still think it's fucked up that zero hedge was banned like i don't

think they should have been and zero head for me personally like after 28 2008 2009 crisis like they were actually a very good source of quality information and yes they've strayed away from that a bit with a lot of uh shittier pieces on their site but there still is very good content on their site you just have to again you have to know how to filter it and i think their banning is an example of free speech being attacked in the modern age again going back to the onus is on the individual to filter information, in my opinion, these days. And to have Silicon Valley tech companies sort of dictating who they believe

should be able to speak and not speak on their platforms, that just doesn't sit well with me. So, like, I don't disagree with anything you just said. I always then jump to, like, what is the answer? Or, like, if I was Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, etc., i always struggle with i don't know if there is an answer erbit man pick one sign guy we're here erbit something like erbit maybe i mean owning your own data right like i think that may be the answer or what i say i've been saying more recently is people just

need to speak up like a lot of it shouldn't take people with tens of thousands of followers on twitter to speak up on behalf of other people like individuals the silent i believe there is a silent majority out there who does feel the same way that freedom of speech is being attacked and feel like they're powerless i feel like more people need to speak up and demand that free speech be protected and then you can roll that into privacy as well you know privacy is being eroded as at the same time as free speech is and they hand in hand especially with financial privacy like money is dictated as free speech here in the united states and all right that makes me think i think you're the one today who said uh i know you said delete coinbase about the

stuff i thought you said fuck clear view but no you said delete coinbase um when you think of privacy how do you balance like there's information photos etc that's been put into the quote-unquote public sphere that some of it was done intentionally right you or i posted photos of ourselves five years ago on the internet and they're still out there somewhere some of it's unintentional i have a photo with you from five years ago and i post it you don't even know that i posted it right so we can come find it etc that type of information being used for facial recognition and things like that like how do you think through the framework it's inevitable right I would agree with that.

It's inevitable, but we should have, again, constitutional protections in place where it can't be used against you as aggressively as it is. I think we have two paths we can go down right now. We either get back towards the arc of freedom, freedom of speech, privacy, freedom to move money, or we export the Chinese surveillance social credit system to the rest of the world. And that's what I say in the newsletter a lot. We are erecting the digital panopticon and being cattle herded into it. While right now it's just credit scores and Instagram feeding you ads based off of what you talk about with your wife. But in a second, they can flip the switch and just be used against you. And one second, you're getting fed ads.

The next year, not being allowed to buy plane tickets because you said something uncouth. Yeah. Or you went outside to another country and there's a virus and now you can't fly back to the United States. Yeah. Right. um which literally i went to my cousin's wedding in mexico and i think united airlines literally emailed me four times before the flight being like if you went to china in the last 14 days don't show it to the airport and i was like well thank god i didn't but if i had how do you get

home yeah and how do you yeah right and that and that's for like a quote-unquote health related incident you're basically saying well what if it was just because you posted a stupid picture right or you are friends with somebody slippery slope and that's why i mentioned urbit right you want to build systems and bitcoin falls into this category too systems where it's just not possible to do stuff like that like bitcoin being a distributed peer-to-peer cash system where if you are running your own full node and you have control of your utxos and you are broadcasting the transactions yourself it's very hard for people to stop you from doing that do we get to a world where everyone does that i hope so i think that's an ideal we should

strive for i can't say that with any degree of certainty yeah you think that's a world we should go towards definitely we should strive for it yeah because again if not um we're getting we're getting the social credit score system exported here and we're going to be subjected to that as well yeah it's like minority report the part to me that is really interesting as you think through kind of how all this is happening is you have two competing forces um you've got probably people who like you and i who are more in the camp of uh we should protect freedoms and like not go down that rabbit hole and then you've got people who um make an argument that the world would be better if we go into that right so like when it comes to the privacy stuff it's like oh we could uh stop crime

if uh we have everyone's you know gps on their phone and we know where they are like well yeah okay maybe but like we just took everyone else's freedom right and it's kind of like do you look to protect people or do you look to actually protect the freedoms of people i mean i think we should do the latter and i think the former is being proven to be completely wrong like you are harming more people than helping more people with kyc aml regulation like explain that every time you have to give up your personal information like a lot of the bitcoin exchanges including the one that sponsors my podcast you which one is it go give him a shout out use the code stacking sats when you download the cash app you're gonna get ten dollars and ten dollars gonna go to al's

the cross um do you see the hard work it takes to clearly articulate the advertising off the dome We didn't even have to read it. Shout out to Cash App. But when you do KYC AML, you have to give up your – a lot of times your driver's license, passport, home address, where you work, how you're receiving funds. And you give it to these companies and they hold it in databases that have proven to be completely insecure. Like we have the Equifax hacks, Target hacks, hacks – any hack you can think of. Well, those are the ones we know about. Well, the Department of Defense just got hacked like last year.

They came out and announced that last week, like the people who are forcing these regulations on us can't even can't even protect their own system. So I think official recognition wasn't there somebody that like Customs and Border Patrol or like a contract or something? They got hacked and a bunch of images of everyone's like faces. Yeah, yeah, that or and I believe they had like the x-rays I could like see through crazy see through clothes like I got hacked as well at some point. I think so. I'm not certain on that, but the point remains. a lot of these companies and uh government agencies that are forcing kyc on people are getting hacked and then you have people's date of birth social security number home address which freaks me the fuck out pictures of their driver's license passport on the dark web is being sold to

the to for it's not even bidding war they just get sold at a certain price and your information's out there and you're vulnerable and then what they are proclaiming to protect us from anti money laundering laws the banks that are supposed to uh basically enforce these laws become the biggest perpetrators of the money laundering like hsbc had bank teller windows purposely fitted for mexican drug lords suitcases briefcases oh i didn't know that yeah that's wild yeah and And Wells Fargo as well. Wells Fargo was my big knock on Warren Buffett. It's like, hey, man, you know, what do you say?

Long suit or short suitcases like, dude, Wells Fargo is one of your biggest, you know, holdings or one of the holdings in your portfolio. And they they pleaded guilty. They didn't even fight it. He pled guilty to helping the Sanoa cartel launder millions of dollars, like billions of dollars. So the HSBC was billions of dollars and they got slapped with a couple hundred million dollar fine. So it's just the cost of doing business at that point. So you're not really protecting anybody. Getting the bank teller window to be refitted for suitcases is an all-time stat.

And then they tell you that you need to do this stuff for your protection. And then behind your back, they're just completely ignoring the laws and then not getting in trouble for it when they get caught. They just get slapped with a fine. it's the cost of doing business where you fucking get caught selling a dime bag on the corner in harlem and you're going to the fucking rikers for years it's fucked up yeah i i uh one of the things that i think will definitely change over the next five years or so is it's not only going to see the decriminalization of all like the possession of small drugs and you know that kind of stuff it's going to actually become uh like the social pressures on anyone who feels

differently can't believe that you think we should put humans in a cage because of it oh yeah that's a good point to bring up like the whole basis for anti-money laundering specifically is the drug war is like the number one uh justification and the drug war is an abject failure it's been going on for decades and people have not stopped doing drugs people not stop selling drugs uh they've actually made more money doing it now they make more money doing it now and then you push people towards you so weeds a schedule one narcotic like you can't use that for medicinal purposes it's becoming more commonplace now but for the longest time you couldn't and regulated opiates were pushed on the masses we have an opiate crisis in the country you watch

the netflix uh documentary pharmacist yeah incredible right like when they showed the video so for those that don't know uh netflix got a new documentary out called the pharmacist and it's a gentleman his son dies um buying drugs gets murdered uh and he goes basically on like a one man it was kind of like a taken you know except for it was like an old white guy yeah but it was it's a great i'm gonna fucking figure this out yeah he did hard hard detective work which which the powers that be don't want to do anymore and they just want to throw all these regulations on people and uh just throw people in cages in a lazy fashion And the pharmacist, I forget his name, but he did hard detective work and eventually found his child's killer, brought him to justice.

And then like the rest of the documentaries, he was a pharmacist and opened his eyes. It opened his eyes and he noticed a bunch of people coming in, buying opiates from Dr. Claggett. Yeah, from Dr. Claggett. And he's watched the opiate crisis destroy his community. and the video that shocked me was when he so when you'd say hard detective where he's literally like in his car 2 a.m like videoing through the windshield with the lights off type shit calling people going through the phone book and calling everybody within like a 10 block radius of where his son was murdered yeah but he he shows a video where it's i don't know 10 o'clock midnight 2 a.m

whatever it's late at night and the doctor's office is open and that's when she's actually giving out all of these prescriptions and all of a sudden he goes and then i couldn't believe it there was a new orleans police officer at the door and he wasn't there to bust them he was there to run security yeah it's like what it's i mean that's a shining example the two-tiered system we're subjected to and that's why again that's why i think more people need to speak up like it's fucked up like and people just put up with it and that's why i decide to dedicate my life of writing and talking about Bitcoin because I think it is an imperative technology moving forward because it allows us to sort of rest control of our sovereignty, financial sovereignty

particularly, away from these people who do not care about you and do not follow the laws that they want you to follow. So the event that recently happened that really opened my eyes to just like no one is safe is the Jeff Bezos dick pic situation, right? like the richest dude in the world got hacked and how about how about them trying to blame it on the saudis too and it wound up being his side piece just sending it to her brother yeah but like here but here's my whole point is like i don't know what's true that's true right like maybe he got hacked and the girlfriend's brother sold it for money like who knows yeah but just the fact

that the richest man in the world is even possible to have his phone. Why are you sending dick pics, Jeff? Well, that's a whole other thing. I mean, come on. You got billions of dollars. Let that flex for you. Stop sending dick pics if you're doing it out there. I'm happy to say I've never sent one in my life.

I'm with you. It's probably because my wiener is not worth sending dick pics. No, but it's just this idea of like the richest man in the world is not safe from the same things you and I aren't safe from. Right? and like in some triumphant way we're smarter because we don't send dick pics right but like like dude what everyone in the world that is an adversary of you is gunning for some sort of dirt some sort of angle on you whatever and it could simply be if somebody sent you a video you open

it and bam your phone's compromised it's the information age we all have access to the same powerful technology encrypt encryption based technology like it levels the playing field for this stuff. It doesn't matter how rich you are, how powerful you are. Uh, the internet has its ways to, to find it out. And there's a bunch of people out there who are getting good at the internet and can bring you down pretty easily. The, so that's like a very targeted, I want to get Jeff Bezos, but, um, the thing that scares the shit out of me. So do you have a Alexa or Google No, I'm not allowed in our room. Same.

So we don't have any of this stuff, right? But I saw a clip of, it was kind of like multiple versions where people have infiltrated the ring internal cameras. And it's an audio and video. So they can see into your home where you set up the camera. And then they start speaking to like a dude on his couch eating popcorn or a little kid or whatever. And they're like, hey, man, what are you watching? and the like what the fuck right and they're like hey you hear me over there and you're like dude you literally put a camera for somebody to hack into in your home and gave them a microphone to

scare the shit out of them yeah you run it on wi-fi they can do that and then if you have like nests they can literally fuck with the the temperature of your house oh man like the internet at some point they'll be able to unlock your doors because it'll all be bluetooth amazon's trying to get that to people with ring they're trying to make it so you can like have oh when When you're not home, Amazon can open your door and leave your package inside so they don't get stolen. But people are like, oh, that's convenient. Again, and that's the weird predicament we find ourselves in in the information age. A lot of people ceding freedoms and privacy for convenience.

And that's, I mean, we are still monkeys at the end of the day. We're still animals, and we have animalistic tendencies, and we have reptile brains that just over millions and millions of years of evolution still react in certain ways and will take convenience over privacy and safety just because it's easier, right? So that's one thing we do need to focus on in this day and age is you really have to think about what you're seeding when you bring these technologies into your home. like i i have the the little shield for my camera on my laptops but like yeah but my laptops can hear me i don't have alexa or google home but i'm sure apple's or somebody who's hacked i'm just assume that everything you own has been hacked yeah um i'm sure somebody's able to listen in some microphone some capacity in my own i mean look it's exhausting if you took a really hardcore privacy first mindset you would switch out devices you would you know not bring

certain device like you wouldn't have a cell phone right i mean like all this stuff and just life would suck right so it's like there's definitely a balance uh but like so i draw the line at the smart speakers for sure so no alexa google homes any of that anything else that you won't bring into your home um ring cameras no ring yeah no ring i have like i live in an apartment building my neighbor has ring on his door i'm like what the fuck are you doing we have cameras because amazon needs to drop a package off that's what the front door is for like the doorman um what else that's that's off the top of my head that's all i can think of yeah like uh yeah i try to be as low tech as possible only the bare necessities it's also

a thing where um it's not only decisions you make though in your home you get to make the decisions but when you walk outside like i forget i think there was a study maybe it was in london a person who walked to work the average walk to work how many times a camera recorded them and it was like 140 times you know some stupid number where you're just like how's that even possible there's dating app hinge is a dating app where it literally tracks you as you walk to work and tries to partner you with people who have a similar commute that you do. Really? Yeah.

Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. I mean, I'm not on it. Apparently that's what the kids are using. One of the things the kids are using. Are you on TikTok? God, no. That's a cursed app.

Why? China? I think China's taking all that data and then it's making people do weird things. Like what? Like you think China's like secretly programming dance moves in America? No, I just don't think it incentivizes towards anything productive. productive yeah that's true yeah the part that i think is crazy uh when it comes to all this stuff is we live in a world where if you went you asked like 15 year old kids would you rather be a

professional athlete or like a tiktok star it's like a growing percent of them they'll say they want to be tiktok star yeah right and so they're like getting habitually addicted to this like feedback loop that's a screen and it kind of reminds me of the like ready player one type you know like there's the the one world you go into the portal of a different world like we're basically there already yeah i mean i experienced this shit on twitter i'd be lying to you if i didn't get dopamine hits from like some retweets and shit like that and i try to limit it to that and it's double-edged sword because i use twitter as a networking uh networking platform the better linkedin better i delete a linkedin linkedin's worthless

in my mind um if you want you can answer some of the linkedin messages i get from the oh we're software developers i couldn't take any more of the cheesy linkedin post one day i just rage quit i was like this is not worth my time you uh i don't think i ever told you this but you'll love this uh my dad is a linkedin savage so he used to have facebook my mom was like yeah knock that shit out you spend way too much time on it then uh he had twitter for a little while and like quickly went down to like i'm an old white republican you know just saying all kinds of crazy shit so like my brothers and i basically had the intervention like hey man chill out uh and so he's on linkedin because you know he pretty much no one's gonna

make the argument that he can't do business there right so my friends the new uh scheme is they will literally screenshot the his post he comments us and he rips people apart boss like those posts you're talking about where the like guys like ah you know this year we grew our revenue 10 and we hired 20 people and like in the like super self-congratulatory the one i remember is i had like 16 friends all screenshots ended to me he like commented on some duties like you know hey Hey, Sam, I see you are really good at learning how to self-congratulate yourself, but I never seem to see any of your businesses stick around for more than 12 months. Maybe you should like stop focusing on yourself and actually focus on building a business.

Like, you know, the rest of us are tired of reading your bullshit or whatever. And I was just like, he's not wrong. Mr. Pompliano, the LinkedIn troll. I love. Yeah, but like you can't post that in 2020. We need more of it. It's like 2018. I'm going to come to the defense of your dad.

We need more of him. Especially on LinkedIn. We probably do. I was having this conversation earlier today. People are becoming more and more afraid to speak their minds, which is bad. Again, going back to free speech, people are self-censoring, which is not good, I don't think. Well, here's my challenge to him. I said, look, two things.

One, why the fuck are you friends with all my friends on LinkedIn? And then I realized that somebody discovered him commenting and it told everyone else and everyone started requesting him. Of course. Which, like, you know, shout out to my friends. They're geniuses for that. And then two, I was like, dude, what do you get out of that? And he was like, no, that guy just need to learn his lesson. And I was like, hey, you got a point.

But like. Right. I in person trolled somebody over the weekend. A group of dudes. We were in Brooklyn. My wife and I were walking. What's going on over there in that country in Brooklyn? Oh, my God.

All right. A group of dudes. Too much cloud chasing. It's a cloud chasing nightmare over there. So there was a group of dudes cloud chasing, like taking pictures in front of a mural. i'm like what and like you could tell they were just like about to post the instagram and i saw them from two blocks away i'm like walking with my wife stroller stroller oh yes and uh they uh they walk by me and they're like looking at their pics you tell like which one should we post i was

like god you get a good one and they're like you could tell they're like oh fuck the dude with the stroller just but it's like to be honest though once you get to like young dad status i mean no can touch you yeah like what are they gonna do turn around like talk shit to you in front of your wife and your kid no i i was hoping so i was hoping they would have the balls to but that's the thing like everybody has this online persona myself included i'm guilty of it too especially on twitter but um isn't twitter like the wwf yeah i mean twitter i think twitter is a merit more of a meritocracy i believe they were trying to post to instagram where it's uh more of an art show yeah more of like make your life look better than it actually is have you seen the uh instagram

mccarthy's influencers in the wild i've seen um i've seen uh people have i've seen people share it on twitter where i've seen it yeah and like just a bunch of dudes taking pictures of their girlfriends on on the beach i was uh when i was at my cousin's wedding um we're sitting on the beach the other day before and i kid you plenty like hits me and it's like and i'm like what she hits me like two more times and she's like points and there's one girl standing uh 10 feet from the water another girl standing with her feet like barely in the water and uh they're taking a picture of the girl into the water she's posing posing posing goes on for like eight nine ten minutes and you're like you gotta have a good like did you get a good one right like exactly

but i'd never seen this before they both come together they're looking like hey which one should we post exactly what you just described they go sit down five minutes later play like punches me like what they're back oh my god same girl taking pictures of the same girl do the whole you know charade again go sit down 20 minutes later they're back a third time i literally almost got up and was like hey y'all gotta chill like what are you doing with your life well just you spent the last hour i i already know trying to get one photo yeah and by the way i don't think that the photo is gonna change anything about what's going on you're already in mexico people know i promise is a dopamine hit worth it but a great test is uh is your wife on

twitter uh she's not she's not all right so polina's on twitter and one day i was driving polina actually uh when i first met her she had more followers than i did i got like 1500 like 4 000 right and she still gives me shit about it today and so she's still got like a big fan she's got like 20 something thousand almost 30 000 followers so it's not like her twitter is ghost town right she's got stuff whatever but i handed her uh my phone one day and i'd said something like controversial people all freaking out so again go back to like i'm addicted to the dopamine just like everybody else i was like what are they saying and she refreshed the notifications and notifications popped up refresh it again popped up again she likes me because this is fun

and she was just like every time you just refresh like there's something there and it hit me i was like holy shit we're just rats and hamsters on the wheel man yeah i mean and it feels uh it feels like we're but it feels like we're coming more cognizant of this too like but does it matter it's unhealthy do you change your behavior i now that i have a child i try to um you know just because it makes you really puts in front of you that there's more important things in life um but do i want to go yell at the trolls or do i want to go hang out Yeah. I want to go actually live life. And I'm still, I still have my moments where I'm on Twitter way too much. Like my wife would definitely say that I'm on Twitter way too much still. It is an addiction and it's actually, there's studies coming out that's affecting the young people terribly. Like it's creating terrible social hierarchies, particularly in middle school, particularly affecting the girls too.

Like you have self-harm and suicide rates for like 12 to 17-year-olds spiking because of the sort of hierarchy that social media is causing for them. I was with a guy who's an eighth grade teacher, but I think he – or I think he's a science teacher maybe. But I couldn't resist asking like what's going on in middle school? right just like you're in it every day man you're doing hand-to-hand combat with you know 13 year olds like what are they doing and he told me that the biggest things uh are one they all know everything before the teachers right because they're always on their phones two is uh the things that they are consuming are like complete it's all tiktok and like all this kind of stuff and he goes the third thing is we don't know that the bullying is happening and he goes all the

bullying that like you and i probably saw when we were in school where it was like physical you know bullying or like people would point make fun not sit with them at lunch like all that shit i'm sure some of it still goes on but he's like the bad shit all happens online and the teachers are completely removed from it so what they actually have is like basically like rats they like develop sources and like you know little johnny tells the teacher like hey man like it must be really mean to marry and the teachers gotta try to i'm like dude we want you to teach right like but this is what you're spending your time on he's like yeah we have to because the kids are freaking out about it yeah and it's like i talk about this a lot on the podcast too like

we're just born at this inflection point and we don't know how this stuff's going to affect again being animals and monkeys that have an evolutionary process like this change is so drastic and so quick we literally don't know how it's affecting or beginning to find out how it's affecting our psyche and our social interactions but it's playing with fire right because the change is so drastic the information spread is so instantaneous and we're literally chemically trying to react to this change in real time and it's very hard if not impossible because the pace of change we're living through right now is far greater than any pace of change we've ever lived through up to this point in history speaking of pace of change uh the macro economy

is on stilts it is wobbling and it feels like it's just waiting for someone to kick one of the legs out and this whole thing's going to topple over because a coronavirus might be that that kick yeah i mean theoretically it would make sense that there's something that causes economic slow down inactivity and next to you know like you pop the pin yeah right or I guess the pin pops the bubble yeah and what do you think's going on like I'm literally staring at Twitter right now and hashtag stock market crash 2020 is the third trending topic right now well it's after number four hashtag Trump crash well it's the way we structure our economy like again going back to time

preference we live in a very uh i believe pierre rochard coined the term the high velocity trash economy um we uh the incentives of our economy are such that like we're forced uh to go after growth at all costs and i think that's basically the main crux of the issue that we're experiencing right now i read about this earlier this week in the bent there's a thought experiment i thought experiment. I got a question posed by an economist, I forget his last name, Tomas something. He says, when you're thinking about economic growth and economies and how you want your economy to run, you got to ask yourself the question, do you want to be a man on the bike or a man standing on his own two feet? And when you're a man on a bike, you have to keep

going forward. If you stop momentum, you're going to tip over and fall over and hurt yourself. Whereas if you're a man walking on your own two feet, you have the opportunity to stop recalibrate look around without falling over and hurting yourself and the growth at all cost economy that we live in right now we live in our economy on the bike uh it's a debt fueled we went off uh the gold standard in the 70s and since then we've been printing a bunch of money and moving production or trying to stoke production in in the present uh by taking money from the future and promising growth in the future more importantly and we're getting to the point particularly with the way demographics are set up in a lot of these countries in america

specifically that it just doesn't make sense that we're going to be able to keep growing at the same pace so macro trends right now demographics are are one of the biggest it's the one thing that i didn't understand three or four years ago that now it's like whoa stop you know stop the alarm the whole nine yards is demographics lead right and if you watch the demographics you can pretty much understand what's going to play out. Japan's a great example of how this happened a number of years ago. And the US is probably better because, well, at least there used to be such a high desire for immigration. So you kind of continue growth, not just by your own birth rates, but also kind of importing people from other countries. But when you start to look at that, there's this weird

world of like you or i can't stop kind of the train right and like it's headed where it's headed we can analyze it we can talk about it we can warn people all this stuff but like that train's going what we do have control over though is what we do right and i think this low time preference when you start to like not only do low time preference but also the anti-consumerism your life like drastically changed like you really change the decisions you make on a daily basis what you buy you know all this kind of stuff and it's very free yeah you're just like i don't need all this shit that and then it's an important step towards fixing the problem so we need to invert the way things work right now everything across sectors across uh uh across life is very

top down like the government uh obviously the federal government here in the united states makes a lot of decisions for everybody in the United States. I think that needs to change drastically, and it starts individually by maybe turning away from a consumerist lifestyle, trying to save more, get your own balance sheet and order. But I think we do really need to get back towards localism because what you have fed is a perfect example of this, is people who think they know better than everybody else

trying to micromanage complex systems, and that's impossible. I think one of the biggest causes of sort of the troubles we find ourselves in today is people fundamentally misunderstand complex systems or aren't even aware that they exist and we live in them. So the Fed trying to manipulate the economy of 320 million people with interest rates and expansion and contraction of the monetary base, in my opinion, is very top down. And you have 12 people trying to micromanage a complex system. And that's just not possible. These stuff has to be emergent and emerges from the bottom up, from you making personal decisions to save more instead of spend more. And then you move that up to the local level where your township, your town, and you guys make decisions for what you need at that level. You stand on your own two feet.

You're not on a bike. You don't have to go growth at all costs at the city level. You can decide as a small community what is best for you at that given point in time. um where right now it's complete opposite and it's kind of like the false um promise of like oh well of course we're going to listen to the the government right like how could they not have our best interest in heart how are they not smarter than us and then once you understand no they're just people and like by the way the people who are running those organizations usually have done nothing else other than optimize their life to get into that role yeah and that's the

scary part yeah a lot of them never run businesses a lot of them are psychopaths sociopathic uh just want power um and yeah they really don't understand they're completely uh dislocated from the people they're representing i mean that's why trump's president right like he i actually think that his rise to the presidency is going to go down as a like the most obvious thing in hindsight you know 10 years from now people look back and be like of course that was going to happen but we've almost forgot like you know when he first got elected people are like what the fuck just happened yeah it was people the little man far away from the coastal elite saying we need to change i will do anything to get change i'm not saying trump being president is good i don't i

think he somehow convinced people he was the common man yeah or that he was going to fight Trevor Burrus Or at least he's going to fight for him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And whether or not he's followed through on those promises, a lot of people will debate. I tend not to pay attention to the politics as much as possible because I do think like we're going to look back in retrospect in this time. Like you never know that the empire is crumbling in real time. You only look back in retrospect and are able to say, oh, it was obvious that the decline had set in and we were in the middle of it. I think we may be in the midst of a huge decline that in retrospect people look back and be like, holy shit, like that.

And you're talking about not like in 2020, you're talking about like over a decade or something or maybe even longer than that. Yeah. I mean, not this single point in time, but yeah, I mean, you can go back. I mean, 2008 might be like the what historians point out and be like, oh, that was that was the first crack in the armor. That was – yeah, I mean that was basically when you can point to and be like, all right, legitimacy of the system is gone. How much of that – so like you and I are close in age and I always describe 2008 as like the time where people around our age were old enough to pay attention and kind of like realize something was happening but not old enough to have enough assets to really like be hurt by it, right? If you were 30 in 2008, you pretty much got like either wiped out or kind of – you get knocked off your feet a little bit. If you're older than that, some people were well-protected. Some weren't.

But if you're 16 to 22 years old, like you knew what was going on, especially if you were studying economics, which we both did. But you didn't get hurt by it. And so you almost like grew up seeing what could happen but didn't have the negative effect of it. And so you just don't trust the system. Yeah. No, I mean, I was 17 in the fall of 2008, again, taking a just happen chance, taking an elective economics class in high school. And so we I was fall quarter. I was in that class and my teacher is very astute, like, gentlemen, this is not good.

You should be paying attention to this. We went to the TARP bill. And even then, like a 17 year old going to the TARP bill, like the clauses that politicians snuck in just to get it passed as the country was in, quote, unquote, dire straits. Like it just smelled of bullshit, reeked of bullshit. And so I definitely went into college with a no, your enemy mentality with all this stuff. And yeah, I'm, I mean, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't scarred by that, that happening at that particular point in time. And yeah, I don't trust it at all. Have you seen the, I think it's an HBO documentary panic and it's where they bring together all of the major players.

I haven't seen, I've seen like interviews with them. I've seen like clips of it. I haven't watched the whole thing yet. Okay. so there's um the most telling thing of anything i've ever watched read anything about the global financial crisis in there they've got um who's the goldman guy a big tall bald guy paulson paulson yeah and uh at one point um they're going through the story where he's about to go in front of uh the government and ask for money and he's like i knew that we needed you know 700 billion but i

know i couldn't ask him for that so uh what'd i do too true baby no he's like so what'd i do uh i answered the questions right and uh they then like basically show him the hearing and they're like so mr paulson like how much money are you gonna need here and he's like well you know we don't know exactly blah blah and he's like basically bullshit and they cut back to him and he's just like cackling laughing and you're just like don't tell me these people didn't know what they were doing oh they i mean like he is telling you that he knew what he needed to do went in front of congress or senator whatever answered questions and did not say the answer how do you ever trust that system again you can't and we're literally he gets to laugh about it 10

years later yeah him geithner all those guys there's like a there's a there's like a meme i think it's timothy geithner i think he's at davos or something is on stage it's him and paulson And they're like cackling. It's not this interview, but they're cackling about like how they saved the world. Rudy Havenstein posts this every once in a while. And it's great. It's not these people. And just they think they live on a different tier.

And that they again, it's the power hunger. The incentives of the system, the way they're currently set up, allow those people to get to those points and control the system. And they get they get a lot of power from that. And that power corrupts. Right. and they don't care about the little man they didn't care about saving the country everybody got the little man got fucked all their houses got possessed here's the crazy part about the whole thing is i would actually make the argument the actions they took prevented further damage

in that short period of time but what i try to explain to people is it's like saying to your kid hey i'm gonna teach you how to swim and they start swimming and you're walking next to them in the pool and the second that they start to drown you save them and then they now think because you continue to let them swim that they know how to swim and when you're not there later they jump in the pool and they drown because literally you've like tricked them into thinking it's okay well that's basically what's happening in the financial system in the sense of hey we'll do this quantitative easing thing and like we'll kind of like inflate away the problems but at some point you got to pay for the sins like that's what i like whether it's over leveraged unprofitable

companies in public markets whether it's central banking bullshit like whatever you eventually have to pay for your sins and i think that's the scariest thing that we could face is it all happening at once yeah well now it's going to be worse right then if we just let it the of course the companies fail that should have failed in 2008 now i mean with the overnight repo operations like the BIS came out and said there would have been multiple LTCM, long-term capital management like blow-ups, if the Fed didn't step in and do overnight repo. And it became apparent that the people in need of that repo liquidity were hedge funds doing leveraged trades.

So the Fed is now stepping in and helping leveraged hedge funds maintain their margin positions. It was taboo to say 10 years ago, but they're propping up the markets quite literally. it's why the short squeezes like we saw with tesla make me laugh right right because it's just like look you guys are all so fucking smart and here's a dude who literally you guys just hammer on all day long you call him a fraud an idiot whatever and by the way all of that may be true but then you get short squeezed and literally they're doing repo operations half of wall street's crying and literally he's like dude i just built a fucking cool car and you like watch this play out and

it's like that's like a very salacious everyone wants to talk about that one but this happens quite often where you see all sorts of volatility like i pulled up a chart uh of the vix it's like literally skyrocketing over the last couple 20 right now uh it was quite a while well i basically was just like hey guys uh there are a lot of traditional investors who are like ah bitcoin's too volatile i was like i'm gonna check out the vix lately right and over the last three days It's just like fucking up and to the right. And so you look at it and you're like, every asset has its time. And the nice thing about the traditional market is there's lots of liquidity.

And so usually the swings are gold's down 3%, 3.5% today. And of course, hey, Peter Schiff, dude, your rocks are becoming less valuable. Now, granted, in the grand scheme of things, if you actually look at it rationally, it's 3%. It's nothing. That up or down in a Bitcoin day, nobody blinks. It's just that the markets have gotten so conditioned for non-volatile days and kind of just this smooth up and to the right, but that's not how markets work if you don't manipulate them. Yeah, and it's – again, it's a product of the short-term high-velocity trash economy we live in, right? Like these intraday movements, people pay so much attention to and really people should be taking a step back and looking and thinking about longer term.

And again, it's like clickbait media has been brought to the financial world as well. People reacting to these quick movements and stock prices. And again, like I think people need to lower their time preference and it'll be interesting to see. Like we, again, it's consensus out there right now that the Fed is going to step in and prop up markets. Like again, that was taboo, not even a decade ago, maybe three years ago that was taboo. And now everybody is expecting it. And me, I said this on Rabbit Hole Recap yesterday, just heuristically, the fact that everybody expects the Fed to step in, which they may try to step in. But the fact that we think it's going to happen.

Like everyone is consensus thought is the problem. Yeah. And I'm just not convinced it's going to work this time. But do you think that it's almost not even that we think it's going to happen? We want it to happen? Like if everyone thinks it's going to happen? They need it to happen. People need it to happen.

If people were ever over leveraged in the traditional system, they definitely need it to happen. And again, my theory of why the Fed stepped in and sort of provided liquidity to these hedge funds because probably a lot of pensions have monies in the hedge funds. And again, going back to demographics, all the boomers retiring right now and as they're retiring, if you have the system implode, there's going to be chaos. So here's my hot take when it comes to the pension. i knew again nothing about the pension world four years ago i've gone and now met with a number of public pensions corporate pensions etc and really started to unpack like their challenges from like the investor seat from the cio seats impossible job because it's a combination of pressure of what we're investing in everyone's got some fucking scheme right it's like chamath going

on cnbc like esg is a fraud yeah like whether you agree with him or not like good for him for saying it and then the pensions become uh just bait for people looking for two and twenty okay so in the greatest bull market in history like i don't know eighty percent of pensions underperformed their benchmarks right how the benchmarks are what like seven percent a year yeah like how does that happen how do you fucking underperform seven percent years fees even if there's fees how do you fucking still underperform the market was up 30 you didn't beat seven yeah it's because we live in a society where um one of my partners mark always says he goes uh numbers aren't going to be exactly correct but directionally correct for every one computer

scientist that we graduate here in uh south korea graduates like 14 for every one lawyer they graduate we graduate 40 and it's this whole idea of like they're a country of wealth creation or a country of wealth redistribution and so if you're a pension investor what are you doing you're fucking scared shitless you're gonna get sued every time you make an investment so what do you do you just diversify as much as possible and you become super super risk averse but like that's not how you make money investing yeah and part of that is what you're talking about which is oh by the way we're not going to do the work ourselves we're going to hand the money to a bunch of managers because if they fuck up we can fire them exactly right and so you get into this

weird weird world which by the way the fee thing to me is hysterical because mark told me a story um that when he got to i think it was unc uh and i might fuck up the details a little bit but when he got to unc everyone was like we don't pay uh like three and thirty or something you know all these hedge funds were coming out these crazy fee schedules and he goes guys i don't care if i pay 1 in 10, 2 in 20, 3 in 30, or fucking 10 in 80%. If the return we make is

still better than all the other managers, the fee schedule doesn't matter. Jim Simons, they've charged like 5 in 50 for 25 years. But his average annualized return over that span is 66%.

Net of fees. Pretty bang up. So you're like, hey dude, I'll pay you whatever you want if you give me 66%, right? And so it's just like, by the way, that's one guy who can't be replicated, right? I mean, he's far and away the best, whatever, at what he does. But when you start to look at this, the problem isn't, quote, unquote, fees. It's the manager who makes 10% a year and then charges fees and then turns around and hands the pension 3% annualized returns. You're like, dude, these people aren't going to get what they were promised.

Yeah, and on top of that, you have the passive investing mind. set right where you have all these funds sort of moving in lockstep in the same direction again demographics come into play everybody goes to liquidate those passive funds that are in the same markets like just the math is pretty straightforward you're going to pull out all that value from from those funds and things are going to fall in price have you heard of uh i think it's nevada or utah um the uh the state pension manager have you heard what he did no he went in he gets hired fires like literally everyone i think he kept like one person took all of the capital back and put it all in like low cost passive indexes and was outperforming

all of his peers and everyone was like what the fuck and he was like basically we're in a bull market it's gonna go up you guys are all gonna have to pay fees plus your managers can't outperform whatever and this profile i was reading was they're basically like what the fuck do you do every day and they had a picture and he's like sitting at his desk reading and i just remember being like that dude's a boss it's like michael barry just waiting yeah like whether you think he's right or not what you know whatever it's just the fact that like obvious has a very low time preference doesn't think he's got to be the smartest guy in the room and he just looks at kind of like a warren buffett like why are you guys paying all these hedge fund managers just buy

indexes whatever and like maybe he's right maybe he's not but you got to respect somebody who has the intellectual uh courage to still have independent thought in today's day and age when everyone is rushing to passive funds except or to the uh you know herd mentality all going 20 etc yeah yeah it's so again and it's it's a weird predicament we find ourselves in like i think uh financialization of the world to a certain extent has created a lot of passivity and decision-making from individuals, right? Like financial literacy is something that should be more of a priority for individuals. Taking care of your, I mean, Bitcoin is a huge driver of this for me personally. Like I feel more confident in my personal decisions. I control my money

and it's worked out up to this point because I feel like I'm better educated and making more educated decisions as an individual instead of allocating that to somebody else who has maybe perverse incentives to to push you into something with higher fees or just go along with the crowd and maybe they get lazy at their job marad told me this uh and was the one really his brother hammered at home for me which was this idea of like that teacher that firefighter that mid-level manager whoever we as a society want them to be great at their job and then we also require them through financial incentives to be professional investors as well yes and that's really hard one and two uh is a non-realistic expectation we have

so something like a bitcoin where it's disinflationary monetary schedule deflationary supply demand economics provide you know are applied etc if all of a sudden you can have an asset where somebody simply be good at their job and there's this quote-unquote savings technology it really does change the way the relationship people can have with their wealth or their money without having to revamp the education system yeah well the chase for yield is forcing people again to reallocate their money to others right like if you have a sound currency like basically a savings technology where people are able to save their purchasing power over time instead of having to chase that yield in the stock markets uh via fund managers and what what have you pension

funds uh you basically uh decrease the amount of decision making and stress right it'd be so incredible if people would just i mean this is what massir touches on if they could just have their time valued in a hard currency that preserves purchasing power over time so my favorite meme on the internet is uh it's a tweet that's screenshotted and it says cnn just said the world is in 217 trillion dollar debt who the fuck do we owe money to the decepticons right like the world is in debt and it's just this like incestuous i owe you money you owe me money you know the guy down the street owes me money we don't what's going on i mean the future generations of that money right it's future production that we're promising and this is

So, I mean, MMT proponents, they'll say, yeah, that's their exact argument. Who do we owe it to? We owe it to ourselves. Like, we can just print into oblivion. So, I talked to Robert Breedlove about this in the last episode. Hong Kong essentially doing helicopter money, right? The part that cracked me up is the U.S.-based media, mainstream media, is usually using the phrase cash giveaway in their coverage of this. Like what the fuck is going on? Yeah, they're giving each citizen 10,000 Hong Kong dollars like 1,200 US dollars equivalent 7 million people I

Mean by the way great for the people right CZ said this to me He was like usually people don't get it Usually the government would print the money and like inject it into the financial system and somehow the people would never see the benefit If you're a Hong Kong citizen and you get 10,000 Hong Kong dollars like that's food right or that You know, that's something that you can actually do but it's not sustainable sustainable no not at all but given the like in 2008 given the choice to if you were only given two choices bail out the banks or give money to the people the people i would take the ladder give it to the people because it's proved i mean again in the last 12 years has just been

a hijacking of wealth and a reallocation of wealth from the poorest to the richest and it's just pure asset flows from the spigot of money creation to financial assets and real estate My big thing lately is I didn't understand how many leaders in the financial world have been charged with crimes. Like Jamie Dimon, right? Christine Lagarde. She was found guilty and didn't serve any time. She was at the IMF. What is the – what was she charged with?

So she was convicted. this is a 2016 article the International Monetary Fund chief at the time Christine Lagarde has been convicted over a role in a controversial 400 million pound payment to a businessman they found her guilty of

negligence for failing to challenge the state arbitration payout to the friend of the former French the former French president and now she's the chairwoman of the ECB like yeah she's one of the most important central bankers in the world now she was when she was

at the imf too but again we live in a two-tiered justice system these people live above the law and then they try to lecture to everybody below them on how they should live their lives i mean it's it's right in plain sight and for some for some reason we still pay credence to these people when they are criminals at the end of the day this is the reason why i think bitcoin is such a no-brainer i'm trying to pull up this uh this photo uh her signing the dollar no uh i've seen that one too but she uh she went to dinner i think it's back in december let me see if i can find it real quick but basically she went to dinner and uh oh here it is so uh the tweet says i was pleased to invite my new governing council colleagues to join me at an off-site retreat yesterday we

discussed in an open and informal setting the running of the governing council and it's accompanied by this photo and there's like 24 25 people in the photo there's not a person under the age of what looks like 45 or 50 every single person's white the people who still have hair have white hair she's the only woman at the table and it literally looks like if you just put them in like a villain movie yeah it looks like it looks like austin powers dr evil has his round table like and and they're in a uh for those that don't see the photo they're in this like very magnificent old school literally gold trimmed photo uh you know uh on the wall uh big drapes a big chandelier at the table etc and it's just like i think i might even tweeted this photo i've

been like do you trust these people or do you trust math all right and like that's fine there's plenty of people who say like oh i still trust these people they're human whatever but over a long period of time more people will trust math than any group of humans right but this photo just to me like hits home so much yeah i mean again going back to the comments on a few people trying to micromanage a complex system bitcoin fixes this is a huge meme and i believe bitcoin will fix a lot of things it's definitely not a panacea but again it provides the opportunity to develop a new financial system in an emergent fashion like anybody can buy hardware plug in a miner uh mine bitcoin directly they could work for bitcoin directly

and when they're doing that they're buying into a system that is not controlled in that fashion is bottom up has been bottom up for the first 11 years of its existence and i i would bargain or I would argue that it will stay that way for quite some time, forever hopefully. And again, it's completely – it's an affront to the way things are done now and we're going to look back and it's going to be obvious that it was stupid to have – to think that 12 men and women in a room, speaking of the Fed particularly and then Christine Lagarde at the ECB as well and that group of 25 people to think that they can micromanage a global economy. Like it's asinine. It doesn't make any sense. And Bitcoin provides the opportunity to opt out of that and say, hey.

It doesn't seem crazy if you don't know there's another way. Once you realize there's another way and you understand how the other way works, then it seems insane. Yeah. But it takes a lot. It's the thing with Bitcoin. It's a mindfuck. It takes a while to understand.

And that's going back to financial literacy. People don't know what money is or how the financial system works today. so i think there's a concerted effort to make it that way and but once like nine people out of ten i don't do it that often anymore when i would ask like is the dollar backed by gold they'd be like yes like people a lot of people still think the dollar's backed by gold my question is always uh do you understand that the dot like your money gets less valuable every year but dollar backed by gold would seem like that's an even easier layup question and if nine out of ten are getting that wrong jesus but man that's the thing people do know they they don't know it because prices of

the goods yeah they don't know they can feel it they don't and they experience it they just don't know what the cause is they think corporations are paying them less and um joe are you did you pull up to buy bitcoin let's go boss i don't know how you just did that by the way hold on time out for a second joe has figured out the live streaming and he's figured out uh how to put graphics and now obviously uh we just figured out that joe knows how to put images i feel like this is gonna go real bad real fast and he's gonna start throwing up things on the screen that we're not paying attention to joe can you pull up a a picture of uh the mexican central banker carstens he's now the head of the bis there's a picture of him eating a sandwich at some point pull that up

that's the the epitome of uh of the central banking system we i know exactly augustine carston or whatever it's only carston yeah i don't know what photo you're talking about but that i do know uh you'll see it um do you do you think that bitcoin is such a big idea that's why the quote-unquote intelligent people like reject the truth right and the truth being bitcoin is based on verifiable information right and what i was saying to breed love is like most of these people and especially in finance they try to find truth or find facts or data in every aspect of their life and all of their work that they do in investing and then when it comes to bitcoin you're like hey man you don't have to look very far like here's all the information

here's the math and they're just like nah no way that doesn't work which makes me believe like no they do understand the value of it it's just threatens the status quo and therefore they don't want to i think that's definitely uh that's definitely the case and then on top of that it's so much sunk intellectual uh and financial cost into their careers up to this point it's hard and it's the saying it's hard to teach a an old dog new tricks and again the sunk cost of reputation and capital into the incumbent system is such that if it is hard for them to admit that something new is here and it may be better yeah it also leads me to think about um i don't know what do we know what the youngest president ever was in the u.s yeah so you're jfk

or obama i imagine right let's see real quick hold on the youngest person to assume the presidency was theodore roosevelt as he ceded to the office at the age of 42 years and 320 so basically 43 years old uh the reason why i immediately thought of that is um if you look at the election now like everyone's 60 plus years old it's you know pretty crazy uh and one of my big themes over the next few years is like there's this rage against not only institutions but also the belief that like you need 40 years of experience in order to do a job and i think we saw this a little bit uh with like congressmen and congresswomen being elected that were in their 30s and much earlier uh i'm waiting though for like the 35 year old presidential candidate to like show up and just be like fuck

all you guys president's a dying breed i think i think the rock's going to be the president one only because it is official that the president sees a popularity contest and he's the most recognized person he's got uh charisma and he's so physically intimidating that if you put him on a debate state like mike bloom what does mike bloomberg say to him he's literally just looking at a six five guy right even trump trump i think six four right the rock would just dwarf him but it's so again going back to like inflection points like the structure of our government was put in place in 1776 like 200 almost 50 years away from that it's just the structure of our government is not built for, again, the way things work today, how fast information moves

and what is the function of a congressman, a representative? Why were they created in the first place? They were created because they would show up in a local or, excuse me, a centralized place, D.C., Philadelphia at one point, New York at one point, and basically speak on behalf of their constituents they they acted as a voice for their constituents because their constituents were not physically able to show up and speak now that we have the internet that's not the case anymore people can speak for themselves immediately and have their voices heard online like the the actual mechanics of uh of the government officials i think uh and their reason for for being like are made moot today because because of technology like we don't need

to allocate our voices to politicians and that's why i think we should how does it change you're gonna have to have like a balkanization right where things get more localized um i think i think we need to go more local we need to we can't have the federal government dictating in large swaths what everybody across the country and every jurisdiction should do. It just doesn't work that way. It shouldn't work that way. We need to make the federal government smaller

and give states' rights more of a try at the state level and then from the state level down to the city level and township level. Is part of this that if you go with that message, it just doesn't happen? If you basically ask for permission to some degree, it's really hard to accomplish it. But something like Bitcoin and other pieces of technology that in a nonviolent way just simply give the power back, the technology is the solution rather than trying to operate within the box of let's go debate at the town hall. No, exactly.

That's why I focus on Bitcoin. I don't watch the debates or anything like that. Like I think in the long run in my life at least it's going to be more worthwhile to focus on Bitcoin because, again, people call it fuck you money because you have it and you can say fuck you. I'm going to do what I want and that will enable that localism that I was just talking about, right? People deciding for themselves to invest in their local economies and, again, being ground up. been a book i just have been reading finished and have been like re-skimming strong towns it's a book written by a man named charles marone uh he's from minneapolis and it's an incredible book and again it goes back to time preference and uh the uh hasty decisions made

for growth at all costs and basically after world war ii we went out and built uh And people got away from cities, built suburbs and infrastructure outside of cities. And we basically turned our backs on hundreds or thousands of years of humanity figuring out how to build sustainable cities by trial and error slowly over time. And after World War II, we had a bunch of money. we had the dollar was a reserve currency and we just wanted to experiment with expanding into suburbs and um into in away from cities and when we did that we didn't realize we were creating like in software people talk about tech debt like if you have too much tech debt you can basically um hurt your product in the future because you have so many things you have to fix

as you try to scale and it can curb scaling at a certain point uh we have that in america in the form of infrastructure debt like we've expanded our infrastructure specifically after world war two in the 60s 70s and so you have roads pipes dude the subway thing subway shot shout out to the l not getting shut down after the somebody got paid off somewhere right but like compare the subway to japan yeah but we and but outside of the cities it's even worse where you have like towns just being deserted and as soon as one house uh one homeowner decides not to keep up the facade of their house and it goes it goes sort of rotten it sort of decays the the value of the houses around it the neighborhoods die quickly and you have basically a generation's

worth of uh the ability to live in these these towns and then after 30 years we're finding that a lot of middle america and suburbs are decaying and that's why you're seeing a lot of people come back to cities and stuff like that and again going back to time preference uh it was decision made in haste because we thought it was a cool idea at the time but we weren't thinking about generations ahead of what we would have to do to sort of service uh and maintenance maintain all everything that we built and so that's why and that was allowed to happen basically after we went off the gold standard too well at some point the incentives get so screwed up that people who are sitting in the seat are acting rationally but the long-term impact they don't care about

because they're not going to be there. Yeah, exactly. They don't answer the bell, if you will, right? No, I get cheesy with it every once in a while, but I do think we should adopt what's called a seven generations mentality, the Iroquois nation. It's debatable whether they specifically said seven generations, but still I think the concept is good.

You should have a seven generation mindset where you think about the seven generation ahead of you. like do something today do something today that would benefit them and sprawling into like an urban landscape or suburban landscape like we did after world war ii proved to only think one generation had and we're we're gonna pay the price for that uh especially with demographics turning as well uh pretty pretty it's gonna be a hard price to pay and there's again we're gonna look back in retrospect like oh we were going through this right now um yeah it's it's happening like i interviewed a guy on the podcast chris arnade um and he wrote a book called dignity where he

he was a wall street trader at city and after 08 he decided to become a photojournalist and basically go to middle america where uh people were voting for trump and find out why they were voting for trump and it's uh basically the the reason they voted for trump was because their towns are decaying all their jobs are shipped away it's the pharmacist it's exactly what you see in the documentary they're just getting fucking ravaged yeah and this is a serious conversation we need to have this country like where the fuck do we want to go we're on a bike right now that's the thing like we're you got to keep going the way it's structured right now and i think we need to have hard conversations of hey let's get off the bike

growth at all costs doesn't make sense it's not worthwhile and we need to recalibrate our mindset i think bitcoin again i say this a lot big work bitcoin is going to change us more than we change bitcoin the protocol it's going to change our mindset and our time preference and that's why i focus on it because i think it forces people to think seven generations ahead and lower their time preference it's kind of like amazon right where amazon had this like really really incredible growth mindset they basically ran a break-even operation never made money get as big as they possibly could and once you hit some kind of growth milestone it's not that they plateau but now they're optimizing changes now they're creating incredible amount of cash right and

it's not so much like growth at all costs is bad it's growth at all costs at certain times is good once you hit some inflection point though, you can't do it forever. And I think we see this with companies right in the public markets. I think we see it definitely with private companies that are just burning cash. But we see it with the economy as well. And it's, so it's kind of like at some point you go from, we got to get from not established to established. Once we're established, then it's all about this long-term, how do we stay here forever? It's knowing when growth is worthwhile and when to put your foot on the brake. Say, hey, we don't need to.

Oh, be rational. Oh, Jesus. That would be a fucking wild idea. We don't need to go into debt. And that's the thing Chuck talks about in the book, Strong Towns. A lot of these towns are just going into debt to keep up maintenance costs, to keep up maintenance of the things they've already built. And then they want to be able to show their constituents that they're growing. So they'll try and expand cities and towns.

And they're just adding to that infrastructure deck slowly over time. Joe you got the photo let's see he's going to show us this photo and then we're is this the one let's see

I'm confident Joe is currently pulling up Augustine Carson eating a sandwich which we're going to see it's personification of central banking

yeah let's see what uh what's your new favorite book you can't say what you said last time we were waiting oh wait is this it is this a meme oh oh you're gonna pull multiple ones oh there was multiple ones yeah man there's sandwiches everywhere in that photo i like by the way how you said to joe hey pull up a picture of him eating a sandwich and joe pulled up a meme the fact that he pulled up a meme is the personification of this whole fucking operation right what uh and i appreciate you putting them over my face

in the uh video too and that you know what would be a great segment is to uh do this and then we could talk like uh we were central bankers hey man you hungry i'm starving i want to print some what uh what's your new favorite book uh other than strong towns uh it's an old book i'm reading human action right now by ludwig von mises mises excuse me mises i always fucked that up is it mises yeah pretty sure i've been corrected in the past yeah well i don't take your word for it i could be wrong i could be wrong uh i'm reading that right now favorite book i think i'm gonna go back and read inserto um i actually had that on my mind shower thoughts recently like i should go back read fooled by randomness and black swan skin in the game uh he's incredible

yeah that's uh you want to know what i would love to see i would love to see navall talib kathy wood and like i don't know i'd have to come up with a fourth person not even weekly monthly and people get a write-in and there's some sort of like voting system of like here's the most popular questions and it's almost kind of like the at least with navall and talib for sure and kathy i think just has a very different mindset uh female perspective etc they're like the modern day philosophers right and you basically are like what do you guys think just see like because they have such different perspectives than

like the everyday person yeah I mean I'm just fascinated by Nassim Nassim Taleb like very like I think his writing is so lucid and so clear and the way he explains everything especially asymmetry and the probabilistic nature of the world

and the randomness of the world and he does a very good job of explaining emergent systems too in his series of books via languages and stuff like that and how languages have emerged um i would love to pick his brain uh particularly about what's going on right now like seeing him talk about the coronavirus more recently balaji could be another one balaji yeah scott adams another one that could go up there scott sky is that the dilbert guy yeah did you read uh win bigly i don't i don't OK, you got to read. So this is the one book somebody I won't say who told me to read it, but somebody in like the investing world told me to read this.

And I was like, dude, I'm good, because I think it literally has a picture of Trump on it. And I just thought it was gonna be like a super politicized book. But basically what he does is he talks all about like weapons grade persuasion and how Trump very early on he knew, hey, this guy's going to win the presidency. um and what he and it's like one of the examples he gives is uh hillary clinton had a whole data driven team around like what their slogan was going to be so they came up with you know 80 slogans rallies test trump walked in a room like we need a slogan it's like make america great again right and then like it works again he like like dave portland he trump knows how to lean in when when it's the right time and that's actually nothing of somebody you want to hear speak and

somebody who's very controversial and after watching a lot of his talks I sort of don't understand why Steve Bannon like I would like he he is very lucid thinker and very lucid explainer of his view of the world that is somebody I would love to sit down and talk with as well because I think that was like a the media portrayed him as some like death psychopath yeah it's like oh can I make a guess right now I'm gonna cheat a little I have one piece of information about you but i'm gonna guess that the video you watched that changed your mind on him was the real vision interview with kyle bass and steve bannon that wasn't i mean i watched that

um he actually there's a but that wasn't the one that changed your mind that wasn't one change i've seen that i've been on a steve bannon binge um the last few months because again like i was i caught that he's an alt-right white supremacist yeah when i watched the kyle bad the one that i just told you that's the one that changed my mind because i was like holy shit this dude is fucking smart yeah and he is nothing like what he was being portrayed as yeah and and if you're out there listening and you think steve bannon's the devil i would i would highly recommend you go watch he's he's got that's the thing he's got a plethora of hour to two hour long videos out there where he just explains his view of the world very clearly and it makes sense to me like in the last

election and since trump's been in office russia has been the boogeyman he makes a very compelling case that we should be focused more on china yeah so this is um all right this last thing we'll talk about and then we'll get the hell out of here you gotta go home say why um is this model this media model of long-form conversations like some of the podcasts that you or I would do. I didn't understand the power of it until I saw Bernie Sanders go on Joe Rogan. I don't agree with anything Bernie Sanders says. At least I thought before he went on this podcast. I still don't agree with 99% of what Bernie Sanders says for the most part. But I was shocked at the contrast between the way he's portrayed by the media, even though I get to

see him do a debate an interview a speech whatever and the guy who was answering the questions with joe for two hours he was way more intelligent he was way less crazy he had thought out his ideas way more than i'd ever thought you know i mean like all of these things and it was damn we as a society could benefit one from just talking to people who we disagree with etc because we obviously that's helpful but to the media formats changing and like rather than have all these candidates go on stage and just yell and scream at each other and like try to get headlines and dunk on each other like basically it's like a virtual dunk on each other right have them just go do like a three-hour segment and they had to be with a rogue it could literally just be with

somebody from the political media and just ask them all the questions and let them talk and then provide that to people i bet you that those videos would be the most popular videos this the networks ever played and the people would actually be more educated about the candidates yeah but i don't think the networks want that to happen right i think they're trying to push of course you can't how do you sell ads right that and then i do think there's like bernie got fucked over in the last election at the dnc i mean that's pretty well when you're trying to accept it it seems like they're trying to do it again and i'm like you like i'm i don't agree with bernie's policies at all but it does seem like the uh the populist movement on the left

is behind him and for some reason the Democratic Party doesn't want him to be on the stage. I was listening to New York Times, The Daily. Somebody had told me, you know, go check this out. I didn't realize how popular it was.

So the only episode I ever listened to was the other day and they brought a reporter in. He was talking about Bernie Sanders got a visit from the FBI basically saying, hey, Russia's trying to help your campaign. And I guess, at least what the reporter said is bernie didn't disclose they didn't have to but they just didn't disclose that and then it came

out uh that the fbi went and talked to some other campaigns etc um and so somehow in there it got leaked that they went and saw bernie sanders a month before and his whole thing was basically like of course it got leaked you know like a day before the caucus or or whatever and at one point uh the host of the podcast asked the guy he goes well why does trump seem to congratulate bernie sanders and he's like well because trump probably thinks he's the weakest candidate yeah right but like then you go and you see trump is literally tweeting like congratulations bernie good job it's like what world do we live in i don't know man it's fucking we live in a weird world and going back to like what we said earlier as individuals like you really need to critically

think for yourself like that is going to be imperative moving forward and um how do you how do you filter information like you probably more than most i know do a good job it seems like what's your strategy for filtering information so you read good high quality stuff other than subscribing to your newsletter you i put a lot of competing views on the same list i use tweet deck tweet deck is the only way to consume twitter in a good way in my mind you create lists you throw them up on tweet deck and then within tweet deck you put competing views on these lists and over time you basically see what people say how it lines up with what actually happens what has happened in the past and then you just develop trust with some people you follow

um do you curate them like you're on a list uh for me and then also you say something stupid you kick people off the list or do you pretty much keep that i keep them on uh just because again like i know echo chambers are like a big thing and and like bitcoin twitter and stuff like that. But, uh, just to stay honest, I think you gotta, you gotta know how the other, not even the other side, you gotta know everybody's thinking and then develop your mindset based on your experiences from that. And it takes time, like the filtering, my filtering process took years of building lists and sort of, uh, understanding the people on that list and how they react to certain events and, uh, how correct they were over time. It's just not going to happen overnight.

it takes time makes sense still believe in aliens uh yeah just checking all right what one question you have for me then we can finish this up um but by the way top trending now on twitter oh it's promoted is this is how we sonic i feel like you got to throw a final thought about your favorite drive-in fast food uh sometime next week but go ahead what's your question chick-fil-a um and question you always put me on the spot with this hey you're talking about like the trend what are you what are your thoughts on the trends and uh like independent media going forward oh i think game over for the big guys other than the one controversial thought i think i have uh david came in here um and david he showed me a study and i'll caveat this because people freak the

fuck out the data that he showed me says what i'm about to say but i didn't go see how they calculated it whatever but it looked at the new york times uh and since they installed the hard paywall the use of very left-leaning language woke all of these terms and words etc has exploded i don't think that they're going into an editorial room and being like hey we should uh you know lean into this right but one of the things that he really pushed me to think about is like look like take paywalls at the major media corporations we can say that it's still the new york times or whatever but they kind of become these very uh ideological things because if you're now the paying person you're not the advertisers don't pay you pay how many people have the intellectual

honesty to keep paying for something they don't agree with not that many right so you almost be like the publisher now is writing for the audience and so what do they do they lean into what we know the audience likes this so they start to move more in that direction and this was over a couple of months and just the language you use right you start talking about certain topics and it kind of pulls the the thing there and so i think that one that means the traditional large publishers are going to become looking more like blogger style opinionated you're going to try and mimic it yeah like like independent type publishers but they'll still be the large guys two is you'll see an explosion like you know substack obviously i think is those types of tools that will allow

people to kind of build their own things etc uh three podcasts i actually think uh american citizens are really bad at writing in a highly overgeneralized way um it's much easier to just talk and so i think you'll continue to see that explosion uh but then the other piece is this idea of like citizen journalism kind of like what bellagio has done with the coronavirus stuff people now realize there's a social reward for being the best voice on something regardless of your position in society and so you've seen this now with like um tim pool became super popular with all of the like riots and um and protests and stuff with like the civil rights type stuff uh bellagio's done a great job with coronavirus um i think you're starting to see people say like

i'm personally interested in a topic uh and there's a social world like the guy uh you see the guy on the um the japanese uh ship that wouldn't leave i hadn't was there somebody reporting from there so dudes on a cruise off that ship dudes on a cruise everyone gets coronavirus like 600 people got uh infected with a terrible quarantine strategy and he started tweeting or posting or whatever and started to gain a little bit of fame from it and following and they came and tried to get everyone who hadn't contracted it yet off the ship and he wouldn't leave and wouldn't let his wife leave so he got addicted to the fame i i don't know really what was going on but literally like he was like i'm not leaving like i like i

got a job to do like i'm about to live stream the coronavirus not worth it son yeah and so it's just like now that's like an extreme you know example but like you almost get this world where like people feel an obligation and they have the tools you see hong kong protests you see people stepping up the doctor died in china like he felt compelled and crazy he's actually started i mean And rest in peace, him stepping up and then being correct, the CCP making him come out with a statement against what he originally reported and then dying when he probably was correct, warning everybody of coronavirus in December is really igniting, from what I understand, animal spirits within China. People are pissed off that this man who may have been able to not prevent but alert and contain – may have been able to contain the virus obviously more than they have now at this point. And that's a citizen journalist, a doctor who just felt like he needed to stand up for what he thought was right. One of the things that I started to push myself, and I think I'm going to start challenging people with, is when you read the news, meaning not the individual citizen journalist stuff, right, mainstream media, whatever terminology you want to use, historically we've lived our lives, default, it's true.

if you switch that not to default it's lot it's untrue but default this is an opinion i need to investigate true or not true right so kind of like default uh neutral the way you think about the information you consume completely changes yeah this this really hit home for me with the coronavirus particularly like i was out there uh like i i was out there speaking more confidently uh three weeks ago than i have i'm comfortable speaking now i honestly wait why like because like you don't know yeah i don't know i honestly don't know what's going on on the ground like the videos of the people welding the door shut like i can't corroborate them i haven't been able to find it seems like it may be and there's contradicting like people are like oh that's

my neighborhood and they both say two different things yeah and then i've bitcoin friends in and around China who have said maybe the Chinese government's overreacting and then you then you listen to people saying that the numbers being reported are far under what's actually happening it's just again in the sovereign actually in the information age confusion is gonna reign supreme and with coronavirus I'm very confused well and this last thing I'll leave you with this this is all just the actual facts of the information we're not even talking about doctoring videos or audio you know what i mean where it's like now it goes from confusion to like active

disinformation we're still just in the confusion phase and i don't fucking know what's going on you don't know what's going on like i don't think anybody listening to this knows what's going on so what happens when then we enter a world where people are actively trying to give you deep fix yeah like fuck that that's what makes me want to go move to the woods get a farm just chill all right how can people subscribe to the newsletter uh tftc.io um you can also buy merch there for those that don't know he has his sup freaks hat on and uh when we were checking in with security the security guy downstairs immediately eyes wide sup freaks it's a great conversation starter um best way to subscribe newsletter find me on twitter at marty bent

i have my pinned tweet there a link to subscribe um you don't have to subscribe it's just my weird thoughts on bitcoin and macro and philosophy um with a final thought at the end joe is a fucking expert look at you got tails from the crypt logo in the top right yeah and then the podcast tails thank you joe i've been crushing it i'm telling you man he's about to be dangerous so he's literally got your photo up here he's got all the fucking information if uh if he has another three days with this i feel like i'm gonna come in here and he's gonna have a green screen we're gonna be at the beach so all right man listen thanks so much for coming to do this i know we spent a lot of time talking but uh hopefully all of you freaks in uh marty's

world enjoyed this no thank you for having me it's always a pleasure hey everyone pop here if you like this episode of off the chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the apple spotify and other podcast charts please do us a favor and rate review and subscribe to review simply go to the off the chain homepage scroll down until you see the five blank stars taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts i appreciate you listening and see you next time on off the chain